The Gardener and the Carpenter
by Alison Gopnik
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Nov 2025 on Hidden Brain.
The general take
Peter Gray recommends Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter to parents, calling Gopnik one of the country's leading developmental psychologists and praising the book for laying out two contrasting parenting styles in an accessible way.
About
In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading child psychologists, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective and shatters the myth of "good parenting". Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. In The Gardener and the Carpenter , the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong―it’s not just based on bad science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.
Who said what
Peter Gray👍 Recommends
…peter gray recommending a parenting book about contrasting approaches to child development
“One thing I would recommend to parents is the book by Alison Gopnik called The Gardener and the Carpenter. Gopnik is one of the leading developmental psychologists in the country who studied cognitive development among children problem solving development. But this book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is oriented towards parents and she describes there are two contrasting styles of parenting. The gardener approach which is the approach obviously that she favors is so you plant the seed, you provide the fertilizer, you provide the fertile ground and you let it grow.”
Hidden Brain — Parents: Keep Out!at 16:01
Listener reviews
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